What is intelligence? Like many platonic ideals, I think many of us have a rough set of images and concepts that appear in our mind's eye when we think about the subject.

We might think about smart people like Ada Lovelace or Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking, their brilliant analytical minds.

Or maybe we go in a more artistic direction,

thinking about the cleverness of people like Mark Twain,

or Maya Angelou, or Haiti Lamar,

the latter of whom was an actress,

but also the co-inventor of torpedo guidance systems technologies

for the Allies during World War II, the fundamentals of which were later incorporated into modern Bluetooth technologies.

Some people who we might consider to be intelligent are clever in ways that are hard to describe.

They are the smart person you know who you ask when you have a question about whatever or have a problem of any kind to solve.

But you're unable to say why exactly they fill that role in your life.

Maybe they never invented a torpedo guidance system, or like Ada Lovelace, essentially invented the concept of general purpose programming,

but they're smart, they're clever, they're intelligent, and you can tell all that without being

able to quantify it, all of which is to say that there are different types of intelligence,

at least that seems to be the case. There are those who can process mathematical concepts with remarkable skill.

There are those who can write brilliant plays or compose amazing symphonies.

And there are those who seem to be generally capable in some less easily defined way.

Part of the difficulty in coming up with better, more specific labels for

intelligent people, I think, is that the word intelligence is somewhat limiting. Words are symbolic.

They're used as shorthand to help us discuss topics, but are latently limited in both their brevity,

they can't accurately cover all ground we might want to cover, and in their inconsistency,

their variation in meaning from person to person. To some people, intelligence is purely

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